Effect of Wearing Silk Dresses

I love searching Google Books for books/magazines in the public domain. I found this article the other day, it is quite humorous.

The Harbinger of Health by Andrew Jackson Davis, 1861
Pg. 218-9
Effect of Wearing Silk Dresses.
A lady correspondent propounds the following question:
"How does the wearing of silk dresses affect us ladies?"
Answer.-The wearing of "silk dresses" exerts a variety of wonderful influences
upon both body and soul. We have seen examples of intense chronic suffering
occasioned by the habitual wearing of "silk dresses" too tight over the region
of the diaphragm. Instances are on record, also, where the length of "silk
dresses" has inveigled the wearer into divers and sundry difficulties.
Deplorable cases are known where the price of "silk dresses" has disturbed the
financial equilibrium of very respectable progenitors. That alarming and
epidemical phenomenon of the age, known as the trailing of "silk dresses" over
tobacco-stained pavements, is rabidly developing among sensible classes a
psychological disease called "disgust." In young female minds we have observed,
with some beautiful exceptions, that the wearing of very fine "silk dresses"
produces an enlargement of certain cerebral organs-developing the symptoms of
insulation, superiority to poor folks, pride, approbation, and temporary
shallow-mindedness. the physiological effect of "silk dresses" is not much,
however, unless the wearer is nervously-diseased and dreamful. Then the fabric
is too electrical for health.